Alfredo Ruiz: paths of modernity in the fallas

In its goal of understanding and participating in occurrences within its local context, the IVAM’s recent programming centred on the Fallas attempts to analyse and raise appreciation of the fiesta’s immediate historical context, little studied from an artistic point of view, in order to clarify its influence on the present and future of the celebration, necessarily changeable given the current socio-political situation.

In this way, and after a first approach to the llibret de falla through the study of its historical references, an exhibition on the figure of the artist Alfredo Ruiz Ferrer (Valencia, 1944) is proposed for 2023, an essential reference to understand the so-called “experimental” fallas. Trained in the trade of the Fallas workshops since he was thirteen years old, his artistic evolution is indissolubly linked to a personal evolution of his thought, always moved freely within the rigid intellectual, political and aesthetic framework of the Fallas during the decades in which he produced his work. (from 1968 to 2002 almost without interruption and until 2013 in a very specific way).

His career is very particular, a “journey” in which he went from winning the first prize in the Special Section for the Falla Plaza del Pilar, Temptació (Temptation, 1974), with a “classical” aesthetic, to a complete formal purification in the Falla for Mossén Sorell-Corona, Concepte, percepte i afecte (Conception, Perception and Affection, 2008) or Plaza Jesús Després de la desena musa (After the Tenth Muse, 2013).